Entering into a portal of liminality where we are both wholly present in our nowness together but also aware that SummerLAB concludes tomorrow and there begins another nomadic journey towards individuation.

We are at the contact point when the downfall is the origin of the uprising.

We wondered how we might offer a possibility of change to ‘closed systems’ of thinking, creating, teaching into a responsive open system of possibilities.

As always we begin with a practice of gratitude and love.

Sometimes in order to promote healthy shifts in groups and individuals, it is not always necessary to “strong-arm” them, but perhaps hold hands, find a place where you might meet in solidarity with one another’s ideals. Perhaps you might find a more harmonious emotional frequency with which you can fine tune your communications.

Casual ‘thank you’s’ are common place unless they are actualized with the presence of your gratitude. From here, perhaps it is possible to begin a conversation that is guided by your curiosity about what might be possible and to offer your energies towards materializing that possibility into a reality. This is the same process when we are entering movement research.

We are opening into possibility by first acknowledging fully our gratitude for body, for life, for love. And then guided by our curiosities we continue to ask again and again:

“What might be possible? What energies may I offer to you so that you can materialize into actuality?”

We began the experience together two weeks ago asking ‘how is body a system of response,’ ‘how are you sourcing and resourcing your own work,’ ‘how are you always a living subject and never a lifeless object’… you have discovered your own ways to respond to these inquiries. You have inspired and informed me in ways that only the wordless space can explain…I will evidence my gratitude for your presence with me every time I dance. I look forward to our final day together

…with all my love.

The space shifted today, the space of your embodied capacities to create, generate, receive, and respond expanded in big ways. We experienced a wild ride through kinetic space energized by your instincts and impulses. You were spectacular today, without making a spectacle of yourself.

I was witness to your actualization today, not your emotionalizing about the past…you are removing your own obstacles. Truth is, you are asking now for more challenge points, you are inviting the contact point with dissatisfaction so that your can unleash your creative forces.

We experienced when creative energies are synergistic and when they are dynamically disrupted and become destructive to the collaborative process. When we meet each others needs, when we are honest and clear about what we need from one another, we can engage with one another as a vibrant and healthy response system.

When we engage in a passive-aggressive communication system the work carries an ambiguous emotional undertone that often feels displaced and dysfunctional. When we trust one another to meet our needs, when we actively participate in loving reciprocity with one another we vibrate with infinite possibility.

Thank you for caring about the quality of work you create together, may it always arise of and through love for each other. When these vibrations are alive in the space…working feels like an outpouring of your joy as much as it is an evidencing of your embodied skills. Working with you has been my joy. Two more days…I look forward to devouring them and feasting on your absolute beauty.

Expanding and concentrating our movement research and body practices towards ‘levels and layers of space’.

We are wondering how space and spatial relationships can communicate meaning and metaphor. We experienced that space is not empty, but rather dynamic and vibratory.

Not only do our bodies have a living history…but so does the space around us, the working space of a studio also has its own living history, if we listen, we can hear space speaking to us.

We can contribute our loving and joyful vibrations into the space with the quality of energies we generate while we are there together.

As your body rigorously works towards excellence, your energetic efforts contribute an offering of possibility for others, as you rise to higher levels possibilities for yourself, you take humanity with you. We are on our individual journeys as we forge from the fire within us a courage to encounter life as it entangles itself with the gorgeously wicked beast named Choreography.

It is a perceptual challenge to know when we are actualizing the dancing of-through body and when we deploy a persona as our cultural representative.

Dancing, dance, choreography and performance are not representations of your body, it is you actualizing the presence and absence of body through movement, form, flow, configuration, reorganization, dislocation, spatial dimensionality and time.

I look forward to these next few days together…and if I’m honest, yes…I’m of course already trying to act like an “emotional hoarder” and store every second of this delicious experience into my cells…I’m going to keep living in the nowness…thank you for your amazing generosity.

When you’re dancing, and not sending your ‘dance representative’ to do your performing for you, you are wholly present.

We are taking notice of when it is a healthy resource to draw from social energies and when it is supportive to separate yourself from this space and enter into attending to your personal work from a place of solidarity with your own self.

Noticing how we transact the space between what we want individually to achieve or contribute and what others desire to achieve and contribute…as well as acknowledge the dynamic living properties of the dance itself.

In many ways it is becoming its own entity that also pulsates with its own desires. How do we listen to the dance that is speaking to us from inside our cells? What do we notice when we do not disrupt body as an open system of capacity…if body responds ‘yes’ rather than to resist the offer that emerges from within, or from external energies, what might be possible?

I do not know, but I have a sense that your bodies will figure it out.

Thank you for your persistence through this process, I am grateful for your endurance through this very rigorous and intensive eleven days. I am inspired by your warrior-like physical bodies and for the stretch capacity of your minds. I am honored to be in the space with you…

millions of portals and passages into movement research,

you are beginning to frame and un-frame body as kinesaesthetic,

you are actualizing.

A process of feeling yourself in and through perceptual space as it journeys into sensorial awakening and expels itself into movement.

This is a process of becoming, a process of actualizing, not of just imagining what could happen, actualizing what is happening!!!

Today we began to explore how the biodynamical process of embodiment can be expressed and framed as kinesaesthetic. This can become an access or entry point into movement research for choreography. This process has been multidimensional and is traveling through many layers of your body.

We began with muscles, flesh and bones–matter and mass.Then we entered into the nervous system–sensation, states of being;now we enter into perceptual space–the realm of the wordless, nameless, the unknown but felt, the portal into consciousness and creativity.

Each of you have individuated your own process because your journey ahead is sourced by and through you. The ground is rich with your tenacity, tears, bruises, bravery and your courage. May all that you plant into your farmland grow.

Beginning the day in pain, in direct contact with the broken world…allowing body to acknowledge our hurting.

We spoke of our brothers and sisters who were taken from us in Orlando, we ached in the madness. We also asked body to be a belief system, believing that if we endeavor deeper into dignifying our bodies with practices of freedom and consciousness that we offer a more compassionate option for being in the world. Our dancing today was an embodied protest against insanity. You were broken open. Your body was a portal, not a prison, your dancing was a contact point with capacity, not criticism, your downfall is merely the origin point of your uprising. You were absolute beauty today… i loved being witness to your biodynamical process of embodiment as it materialized into choreography. I am humbled by your enormous generosity, I am grateful I get to meet you again tomorrow.

You are listening to the poetry that arises from your corporeality and hearing it as a feedback loop that arises from the wisdom of your flesh and bones.

We are allowing for body to re-organize itself through its own dynamic system, not controlling it, sourcing it.

You are not simple dance makers, but also energy conduits aiming your creative energies into the world and receiving creative energies back.

Dancing…it can be a practice of freedom…it is a sensation of your exquisite capacity to limitless respond to life.

Dance…an eventing unfolding through body exchanged through a dynamical process of embodied empathy.

Dancer…a living subject speaking a wordless story of their evolving journey through a process of embodiment.

This becoming, it is unnameable, but is narratable by the author who speaks in movement. You are the authors of your own choreography-biographies… choreo-dance, bio-life, graphs-descriptive process…you are scripting, drafting, re-scripting and re-drafting descriptions of life dancing through you.

thank you.

The system of the shoulder:

When we mobilize this system it opens us up to freely communicate with the world our inner most feelings, emotions and sensations.

The opening up of the upper body can bring us into contact with subtle (and not so subtle) emotional energies, some we are aware of…some spiked into awareness today.

Body unfolded stories, memories were journey spaces where you traveled from “then” to “now” to meet yourself in present time…you acknowledged that you desire to call your own body “home,” a space where You live.

It was a gift to be an invited guest into your homes, thank you for sharing your process of becoming with me. Your generosity was overflowing today, it poured from your beings, your eyes, your belly space and throats…you unconcealed yourselves and what you discovered is that you are a body of love.

The journey continues…the work is real.

Thoughts on practices and developments in the areas of experiential learning, interdisciplinary arts education, dance education, and poststructural pedagogy.

Orbiting through space time,riding gravity as it pulls you towards possibility,awakening body as an open receptor site for sensation,allowing body to speak wordlessly as a mode for choreographic transactions,reclaiming body as an infinite space.

Discovering that dance is also a practice of consciousness because it is an awakening of body into life.

Thank you Katharine Hawthorne for your presence, your body of knowledge, your steadiness, your fierceness, your passion, your purpose for being, your artful thinking, your skillful craft, for your heart space that it is so big it could hold us all in its embrace. We are forever grateful for the impact you have made on us all, both our outer and inner worlds are more vivid because you helped us to value wonder, curiosity and the infinite recursion of questioning that is the process of becoming an artist. You will be missed but your presence will be felt in us all. Thank you again. I look forward to tomorrow…

A state of being…Dance….

a dynamic response…Dancing…

a full sensational awakening of your whole self…Life.

You are time travelers slip sliding through sensorial memories and kinetic records as your body manifests movement of and through spine, of and through flesh, of and through the cradle of your pelvis.

You are warriors protecting and defending the rights and rites of body.

You are Love…unconditional love…love has no hierarchy, no life is more or less deserving of love. This is your absolute birth rite…to generate love and to open your body to the reception of its absolute beauty.

I can hardly wait to be with you again, I will see you soon…

Metabolizing change,engaging and enduring the transformative process,allowing body to speak wordlessly as sensation and movement,setting free our voices to share what has been previously silenced.

You are creators of sacred spaces, filling them with your dynamic energies, wild passions and calm considerations about life dancing and your dancing life.

Your body has the limitless capacity to respond to life…dancing is an expression of this response system.

Dancing through life is pleasurable… but Life dancing through you is ecstasy, and is a renewable state of embodied euphoria.

I have melted and take new form a million times already, its been 4 days…I cannot wait until tomorrow when I can quest again for a dissolution of my conditioned body and reclaim again my unconditioned, free body. I hover in the ‘space of dawning’ excitedly awaiting our time together…

Dancing, a mode of being ourselves in the world.

Today was sensational in all ways.

thank you.

Dance as a system, mode and means of response and responding to life…

Body as source and resource for infinite possibilities.

It is in the flux between knowing and unknowing that body responds as instinct in order to find ground(ing), it is here that body can be a great generator of creative energies.

What a strange sensation to seek purposely an unlearning and un-conditioning of our bodies, but new sensation can lead body toward new self perceptions, by seeking and integrating new patterns of movement-thinking we allow body to self regulate, reorganize, reassemble through body’s inherent intelligence.

Only day 1 and I am percolating with so much new sensory information I’m still tingling.

WELCOME TO CAUSE GOOD TROUBLE

This is a site-space for conversations, considerations, dialogues, discussions, inquiries, and questions surrounding subjects related to dance, corporeality, choreography, poetry, politics, culture, art, society, and identity. Cause Good Trouble is a collective thinking space shared by LEDGES AND BONES collaborators, members of the dance community, invited contributors as well as openly welcomes engagement with the public through postings, discussions, and comments shared with us on this site.

What does it mean to ’cause good trouble?’

For us we might say it means to questions everything, to embrace fully the unknown, to risk biting off more than you can chew, to be out loud, to believe in our rights and rites and bodies, persons and people; to speak for social justice and to act against injustices, to dive deeper into relationship with our pain and not to flee from it, to be present with each other, to wonder and be curious, to admit our misunderstandings, to unknow what we think we know, to relish in our aliveness, to disobey ignorance, to dance in the borderlands between reality and imagination, to entangle ourselves in breaking boundaries and exceeding expectations, to champion the fight against sexism, racism, classism, sizeism, and ageism, as well as to encourage ourselves to go public with our full intention to use dance, movement, art and our bodies to stand up and into the world with Body as our Response System to LIFE!